US Market Value of GM Crops is Approximately $70 Billion

I have a short letter in the November 2009 issue of Nature Biotechnology (subscription req.) correcting the record on US revenues from genetically modified crops.  Based on USDA data for corn, soy, and cotton, revenues from the GM versions of those crops were about US$ 65 billion in 2008, rather than the widely misreported ~$4 billion.  The latter figure is in fact just from GM seed revenue.  I would put the total from all GM crops and seeds at $75-85 billion, though it isn't yet clear where GM sugar beets are going to come in.  Assuming US revenues are representative of global averages, thentotal worldwide revenues are probably north of $150 billion for crops and seeds together.

Below is a figure showing US yearly revenues from the three big crops, as well as the US annual total.  Note that although the GM fraction of each crop continues to grow (see the ISAAA report from 2008), prices fluctuate sufficiently from year to year that total revenues declined from 2007 to 2008.  Food and crop prices have come off their 2007 highs -- which cannot last given increasing demand around the world.  I would expect revenues to resume their climb in 2010.

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iGEM 2009: Got Poo?

Here are a couple of snaps of the Scatalog from E. chromi, a spin-off of this year's Cambridge University iGEM project.

Cambridge has built a set of parts that allow generation of a rainbow of color pigments in E. coli.  Designers James King and Daisy Ginsberg got creative with the application of all the hues of engineered poo as biosensors for the human GI tract.  It's all nicely packaged up in a shiny briefcase, just you would see any any tech convention.

Bet that was fun coming through airport security.

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iGEM 2009: In the thick of it.

I am sitting in the Stata Center at MIT taking a breather from serving as a judge at International Genetically Engineered Machines 2009 Jamboree.  There are 110 teams here, with over 1200 students from around the world showing off their projects with great enthusiasm.  As we have a full day left to go before the deliberations begin I won't divulge yet how specific teams are doing.  But I have to say I am pleased.

iGEM is, at its core, an experiment.  As the wiki says, the teams will "all specify, design, build, and test simple biological systems made from standard, interchangeable biological parts."  Of course, as there aren't yet any standard, interchangeable biological parts, the students are inventing as they go.  And inventing is slow, arduous work.

The most impressive talks I have seen this year do not represent giant leaps forward in new biological technologies (though some of the projects are real steps forward in that regard).  Rather, I have been pleasantly surprised that many teams took up the challenge of improving or better characterizing parts that were already in the registry.  Many of those parts don't work as advertized, or do not have enough data in the registry to know how they really work.  That will slowly get fixed.

That it will take time to get all this working can make the differences between the annual Jamborees appear slight.  Thin film semiconductors themselves took decades to get working, and even then those systems were built on top of a good century and a half of practical experience with electricity and then basic electronics.  iGEM is attempting to squeeze all that effort into just a few years.

I am put in mind of W. Brian Arthur's work on the dependence of innovation on the availability of components.  Here is a recent review of his book, The Nature of Technology. Historically, and theoretically, the complexity of technological artefacts tends to increase in leaps and bounds as components are combined in new ways, and then combinations then serve as components for the next generation of innovation.  But first you have to have functioning components. 

Drew Endy asked me yesterday if I thought we were stuck in a rut.  Nope.  Just stuck in reality.

The LavaAmp (prototype) is Alive!

This week Biodesic shipped an engineering prototype of the LavaAmp PCR thermocycler to Gahaga Biosciences.  Joseph Jackson and Guido Nunez-Mujica will be showing it off on a road trip through California this week, starting this weekend at BilPil.  The intended initial customers are hobbyists and schools.  The price point for new LavaAmps should be well underneath the several thousand dollars charged for educational thermocyclers that use heater blocks powered by peltier chips.

The LavaAmp is based on the convective PCR thermocycler demonstrated by Agrawal et al, which has been licensed from Texas A&M University to Gahaga.  Under contract from Gahaga, Biodesic reduced the material costs and power consumption of the device.  We started by switching from the aluminum block heaters in the original device (expensive) to thin film heaters printed on plastic.  A photo of the engineering prototype is below (inset shows a cell phone for scale).  PCR reagents, as in the original demonstration, are contained in a PFTE loop slid over the heater core.  Only one loop is shown for demonstration purposes, though clearly the capacity is much larger.

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The existing prototype has three independently controllable heating zones that can reach 100C.  The device can be powered either by a USB connection or an AC adapter (or batteries, if desired).  The USB connection is primarily used for power, but is also used to program the temperature setpoints for each zone.  The design is intended to accommodate additional measurement capability such as real-time fluorescence monitoring.

We searched hard for the right materials to form the heaters and thin film conductive inks are a definite win.  They heat very quickly and have almost zero thermal mass.  The prototype, for example, uses approximately 2W whereas the battery-operated device in the original publication used around 6W.

What we have produced is an engineering prototype to demonstrate materials and controls -- the form factor will certainly be different in production.  It may look something like a soda can, though I think we could probably fit the whole thing inside a 100ml centrifuge tube.

The prototype necessarily looks a bit rough around the edges as some parts were worked by hand where they would normally be done by machine (I never have liked working with polycarbonate).  We have worked hard to make sure that the LavaAmp can be transitioned relatively seamlessly from prototype quantities, to small lot productions, to high-volume production.  The electronic hardware is designed to easily transition to fabrication as a single IC, all the plastic bits can be injection molded, and the heater core can be printed using a variety of high-throughput electronicss fabrication methods.

Next up will be field trials with a selected group of labs, as well as more work on refining the loading of the loops.

WWF Endorses Industrial Biotech for Climate Solutions

A fortnight ago the World Wildlife Fund released a report pushing industrial biotech as a way to increase efficiency and reduce carbon emissions.  Interesting.  Of course, industrial biotech doesn't necessarily require direct genetic modification, but the WWF must know that is an inevitable consequence of heading down this road.  More on this after I get a chance to read the report.

Are We Cutting Off Our GM Nose to Spite Our

News today that a federal judge has rejected the approval of GM sugar beets by the USDA.  The ruling stated that the government should have done an environmental impact statement, and is similar to a ruling two years ago that led to halting the planting of GM alfalfa.  As in that case, according to the New York Times, "the plaintiffs in the [sugar beet] lawsuit said they would press to ban planting of the biotech beets, arguing that Judge White's decision effectively revoked their approval and made them illegal to grow outside of field trials."  The concern voiced by the plaintiffs, and recognized by the judge, is that pollen from the GM beets might spread transgenes that contaminate GM-free beets.

A few other tidbits from the article: sugar beets now supply about half the US sugar demand, and it seems that GM sugar beets account for about 95% of the US crop (I cannot find any data on the USDA site to support the latter claim).  A spokesman for the nation's largest sugar beet processor claims that food companies, and consumers, have completely accepted sugar from the modified beets -- as they should, because it's the same old sugar molecule. 

I got lured into spending most of my day on this because I noticed that the Sierra Club was one of the plaintiffs.  This surprised me, because the Sierra Club is less of a noisemaker on biotech crops than some of the co-plaintiffs, and usually focuses more on climate issues.  Though there is as yet no press release, digging around the Sierra Club site suggests that the organization wants all GM crops to be tested and evaluated with an impact statement before approval.  But my surprise also comes in part because the best review I can find of GM crops suggests that their growing use is coincident with a substantial reduction in soil loss, carbon emissions, energy use, water use, and overall climate impact -- precisely the sort of technological improvement you might expect the Sierra Club to support.  The reductions in environmental impact -- which range from 20% to 70%, depending on the crop -- come from "From Field to Market" (PDF) published earlier this year by the Keystone Alliance, a diverse collection of environmental groups and companies.  Recall that according to USDA data GM crops now account for about 90% of cotton, soy, and corn.  While the Keystone report does not directly attribute the reduction in climate impacts to genetic modification, a VP at Monsanto recently made the connection explicit (PDF of Kevin Eblen's slides at the 2009 International Farm Management Congress).  Here is some additional reporting/commentary.

So I find myself being pulled into exploring the cost/benefit analysis of biotech crops sooner than I had wanted.  I dealt with this issue in Biology is Technology by punting in the afterword:
 

The broader message in this book is that biological technologies are beginning to change both our economy and our interaction with nature in new ways.  The global acreage of genetically modified (GM) crops continues to grow at a very steady rate, and those crops are put to new uses in the economy every day.  One critical question I avoided in the discussion of these crops is the extent to which GM provides an advantage over unmodified plants.  With more than ten years of field and market experience with these crops in Asia and North and South America, the answer would appear to be yes.  Farmers who have the choice to plant GM crops often do so, and presumably they make that choice because it provides them a benefit.  But public debate remains highly polarized.  The Union of Concerned Scientists recently released a review of published studies of GM crop yields in which the author claimed to "debunk" the idea that genetic modification will "play a significant role in increasing food production"  The Biotechnology Industry Organization responded with a press release claiming to "debunk" the original debunking.  The debate continues.

Obviously we will all be talking about biotech crops for years to come.  I don't see how we are going to address the combination of 1) the need for more biomass for fuel and materials, 2) the mandatory increase in crop yields necessary to feed human populations, and 3) the need to reduce our climatic impacts, without deploying biotech crops at even larger scales than we have so far.  But I am also very aware that nobody, but nobody, truly understands how a GM organism will behave when released into the wild.

We do live in interesting times.